Alcatraz (2012)

Sometime during its first season (ie 2001) I discovered the TV show Alias.  It was a bold TV show which seemed to delight in surprising and one-upping itself with shock after show in each episode.  Alas, the show played itself out, IMHO, after the incredible episode Phase One, but if there was one thing I came away with from the show, it was to watch out for any new series from producer J. J. Abrams.

This proved to be a good thing as in 2004 I had the upcoming J. J. Abrams’ produced TV series Lost on my radar.  While the show’s ultimate conclusion some years later left something to be desired, there is little doubt that for several years this show was one hell of a thrill ride.

Since then, I’ve seen plenty of other J. J. Abrams works (as producer, director, or writer), from the TV series Fringe to the last two Mission: Impossible films and the re-boot of Star Trek.  Considering the sheer volume of material, it was inevitable some of the material would prove great while others not so great.  Still, my eyes are always open for new works from the prolific Mr. Abrams, so when I heard about his latest sci-fi mystery production Alcatraz, I had to give it a look and yesterday, when it premiered, I did just that.

Alcatraz appears to be a very purposeful attempt to replicate the winning formula of Lost.  Yeah, both shows deal with the mysteries surrounding an island.  Alcatraz, at least with the first two episodes presented, also features liberal use of flashbacks not unlike Lost.

The plot of Alcatraz is simple:  Back in the early 1960’s every single person on Alcatraz -prisoners as well as staff- mysteriously disappeared.  This fact was hidden from the American public but today, in the present, the long lost convicts are returning.  They have not aged and they commit new crimes.  Worse, they appear to have an agenda.  Who are they working for and for what purpose?

Enter Detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) and author Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia).  They uncover the odd facts related to Alcatraz and subsequently intersect with Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) and Lucy Banerjee (Parminder Nagra), two people who know much more about the Alcatraz situation than they’re willing to let on.

Now, the first episode was enjoyable.  The second episode…not so much.  Not that it was bad, mind you, but it was rather repetitious.  Essentially, the first and second episode were interchangeable:  Our heroes chase down a criminal from Alcatraz, capture him, he is sent to the ‘new Alcatraz’.  Side point: Criminal #1 was searching for a key.  Criminal #2 was targeting one of the main characters.  Big reveal the idea that maybe some characters are as “old” as the criminals they’re chasing.

Again, not a bad night of TV watching by any means, but the repetition was troublesome considering we’re dealing with only the first two episodes of the show.  Is this what Alcatraz will be, a “chase-the-villain-of-the-week-while-advancing-the-show-by-increments”?  If so, I worry whether it can sustain itself.

As it is, there was enough good in the show’s premier to ensure I’ll stick around for at least a little while longer.  However, if the story doesn’t move a little bit more and continues to display too much repetition, I may well let it go.

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 11 Movies of 2011

I’m always intrigued by “best of” or “worst of” lists.  In this case, a “best movies” list provided by Quentin Tarantino, a director who made some works I greatly admire:

http://www.slashfilm.com/quentin-tarantinos-top-11-movies-2011/

The one movie that everyone seems to be confused/incredulous because it is included on the list is the Paul W. S. Anderson directed The Three Musketeers.  The movie didn’t exactly burn up the box office and star Milla Jovovich made some very pointed comments, if memory serves, on how little the studio was doing to promote the film.

I never saw it, but I would be lying if I said the commercials weren’t intriguing.  Granted, the movie looked like a very –very– loose adaptation of the famous novel, but that didn’t bother me all that much.  The reviews, on the other hand, did:  The were quite negative.

In the end, the film received a very unimpressive 25% approval rating from the critics and very average 47% approval rating from audiences on Rottentomatoes.com.

Then again, that’s the way opinion goes.  A few days ago I noted how little I wound up liking Hanna (if you are curious, you can read about that here), yet that film made it to many people’s “best of 2011” list and almost made it to Mr. Tarantino’s.

Ah well, that’s what differing opinions are all about.

The other side of Rick Steves

Another post from the past, one that featured a fascinating interview with one Rick Steves.  If you are at all familiar with him, he appears on the show to be someone in the Mister Rogers mold.  My comments are quite brief and the link to the interview is presented at the end:

This is why I like websites like Salon and Slate.  The link below leads to an interview with PBS traveller/showhost Rick Steves, who offers some interesting comments on the world, terrorism, and marijuana!  Fascinating stuff, whether you agree or disagree with his views (and interesting to note that such an apparently laid back and pleasant host could have such strong views on a host of issues!).  The interview appears in Salon.com and was conducted by Kevin Berger.

http://www.salon.com/2009/03/20/rick_steves/singleton/

Re-reading the interview today, now almost three years old, it is fascinating how much/little we’ve progressed in that time.  I can’t say I agree with everything Mr. Steves says, but this question and answer from the article, in particular, I found very enlightening.  Your mileage, as they say, may vary:

What’s the most important thing people can learn from traveling?

A broader perspective. They can see themselves as part of a family of humankind. It’s just quite an adjustment to find out that the people who sit on toilets on this planet are the odd ones. Most people squat. You’re raised thinking this is the civilized way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not. It’s the Western way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not more civilized than somebody who squats. A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.

Speak, Atari

While continuing my search through old posts in the previous blog, I ran upon this post that was essentially a link to the following article by Michael Agger for Slate magazine.  My comments are very brief and hardly worth repeating, but the article itself, if you’re roughly the same age as I am and have very fond memories of the Atari 2600 video game machine, is worth a look:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_browser/2009/03/speak_atari.single.html

Olivia Munn…naked!…well…for PETA ad…

For the past four or so days, whenever I click on to CNN.com and view the “latest news” items on the left side of the page, toward the bottom of this list I’ve seen this headline and link to the Entertainment Weekly posting:

“Olivia Munn poses nude for PETA ad”.

Now, I grant you, Olivia Munn is a very, very pretty woman.  I first discovered her on G4’s Attack of the Show where she was not only gorgeous (something I suspect she is incapable of not being…it’s in her DNA), but also delightfully funny.

However, having said all that, is CNN so starved for news that this article/link deserves to be up there for all these days?  I mean, I’m as red blooded a male as anyone out there, but…

…hell…

Those are some nice pictures! 😉

Telefon (1977)

As I continue to go over some of my previous blog posts, I’m finding ones here and there that I feel are worth re-posting.  Here then are some musings about the 1977 Charles Bronson film Telefon.

One of the more frustrating/depressing things about getting older is that you find many of the films you cherish are being remade.

Did we really need a remake of the very unique, classic sci-fi film The Day The Earth Stood Still?  What about The Wicker Man? If you’ve seen the mind-bending original, a work that simply could not be made today, did you really think this film could be remade/reworked into something worthwhile?  And coming soon, a film that has already been remade (for television in 1998): The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

That’s not to say I’m against film remakes.

One of my all time favorite films, The Maltese Falcon, was the third (and best, of course) theatrical version of the classic Dashiell Hammet story.  But I bring this up because the other night I was watching the 1977 Don Siegel directed, Charles Bronson actioner Telefon.

Telefon is a very entertaining action film that features a rather unique plot: During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union “programmed” some fifty people to commit specific, horrific acts of military sabotage within the United States.  These people were subsequently brainwashed and planted throughout our nation and given new identities as American citizens.  Their brainwashing was so complete that, at the movie’s present date, none of them have the least awareness that they are in actuality Soviet sleeper agents awaiting activation.

But as the Cold War dragged on and overtures were made to establish a detante between the super powers, the years inevitably passed and the sleeper agents fully enmeshed into their American lives, still completely unaware of their Soviet “programming”.  Some are successful, others are not.  Some have married and have kids while others remain single.  All the sleeper agents are approaching retirement age.  Unfortunately for them, a power struggle within the USSR and a messy purge has caused a renegade officer (played with manic glee by Donald Pleasance) to jump the pond and activate one sleeper after another.  His goal is to heat up the now dormant Cold War.  Upon realizing the danger, the USSR recruits KGB Major Grigari Borzov (Charles Bronson) to go undercover to the United States and root out and eliminate Pleasance before he causes a nuclear war.

Now, this film is a perfectly good escapist piece of entertainment, even if it’s not what one would classify as a bona fide “classic”.  But in this day and age of suicide bombers and terrorist fears, wouldn’t this film’s concept, with some modern twists, work pretty well?  Unlike some of the other films being remade of late, this might be one worth revisiting.

Anyway, if you’re in the mood for a good, suspenseful little action film, you’d do much worse than catching Telefon.

Island of Lost Souls (1932) a (incredibly belated) review

The first -and only- time I saw The Island of Lost Souls it was on PBS…I’m guessing probably somewhere in the very early 1980’s.  Certainly no later than 1984 or 85.  The movie stuck with me…there was something incredibly savage about it, almost primevil.  And yet, I could remember very few of the film’s details…in fact, apart from the climax, almost none.  I actually had a better memory of story details in the 1977 remake of the film, The Island of Dr. Moreau, than I did of this one.

Regardless, the memory that I had witnessed something special stuck with me.  It was for the most part impossible to find the film on VHS and then Laserdisc and DVD, so  I never had the opportunity to revisit it.  Until now.

The good folks at Criterion have released a Blu Ray edition of The Island of Lost Souls. That company treats their releases as if they were royalty, finding excellent prints and often giving very nice special material to complement the movie itself.  What was even more exciting was seeing that the film would be released on Blu Ray in its full theatrical edition.  When The Island of Lost Souls was originally released, it created something of a furor and trims were made to remove some of the more…excessive…stuff.

By today’s standards, that “excessive stuff” is, for the most part, pretty tame. However, there remains some material -Moreau’s sexual depravity and sadism- that might still turn people’s heads, if only a little.

The great Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau, a very strange man who owns his own uncharted island and has a collection of equally strange looking servants.  The story proper, however, begins when Edward Parker (Richard Arlen, quite excellent in the protagonist/hero role), a shipwrecked sailor, being found by a trawler.  He meets up with Mr. Montgomery (Arthur Hohl), a man who is on his way with a gaggle of animals in cages to take to Dr. Moreau’s island.  From the very first scene, it is clear that Montgomery is a decent man who is clearly in a situation that he loathes.

Through circumstance, Parker winds up going to Dr. Moreau’s island.  Once there, he becomes a pawn of Moreau’s insane experiments.

Considering the movie was released in 1932 and the H. G. Wells book it was based on in 1896, it is remarkable to see a movie reach for scientific advances and concepts that were many, many decades away from realization.  This is perhaps the most remarkable thing one takes away from this movie.  Like Jules Verne, who theorized about things like airships, submarines, and trips to the Moon long before such things came to be, Mr. Wells in that novel theorizes about genetics and DNA manipulation when such things were a very far way of.

Yet Mr. Wells and the makers of this film succeed in their allusions to things not yet in existence, creating a frightening scenario where man tries to alter flesh and species to recreate it in his own demented image.  Dr. Moreau, as presented in this film, is clearly mad.  But what is most frightening, in the end, is how close he is to his mad ambitions.

Needless to say, I highly, highly recommend this film.

 

Hanna (2011) a (mildly belated) review

There is nothing more frustrating than seeing a film that has all the ingredients to be a major success (great actors, a decent budget, an intriguing concept) fall flat on its face.

I read the reviews of Hanna when it was first released and was impressed with the positives. I liked the plot idea, too, of a young teen bred for warfare going up against the people who created her. It was an edgy concept, not all that different in concept from the intro material in my very own novel Mechanic (shameless plug!).

But, upon finally seeing the film yesterday, my disappointment was great. You had a great cast, a decent budget, but a film that was directed, alas, by someone who seemed intent on creating an arty Euro-tinged fable rather than a gripping/gritty action thriller.  Mind you, there are plenty of “arty Euro-tinged fables” I happen to enjoy quite immensely (One of my three all time favorite films is Orpheus, which one could describe as exactly that!).  Hanna, however, was screaming for something more in your face.  The movie was soft where it should have been hard, introspective when it should have been explosive, and heavy handed when it should have been sure footed and sleek.

Worse, some of the action scenes, in particular the sequence where Erik (Eric Bana) takes on four CIA killers in a Berlin subway, looked like the actors were in the early stages of doing rehearsals rather than actually filming what should have been a crushing fight to the death. Oh what circa 1984-90 James Cameron would have done with this material!

Interestingly, this is the second film in as many months that I’ve seen where I get the feeling the original script/story was probably darker and more complex than what we eventually saw in theaters. The first such film was Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol (I re-posted the original review here and haven’t changed my mind regarding where I believe it was originally going).

For Hanna, I began to feel the story was changed toward the movie’s last third. When the character of Erik (Hanna’s “father”) is fleshed out and Hanna’s identity/background is revealed, I figured for sure the movie would move into much darker territory. After all, her “father” is an agent betrayed. Why make his and Hanna’s survival made known to their most moral enemies?  What purpose could doing so, other than draw out his enemy, serve?  And once he makes Hanna announce herself, why split up with his daughter at that point and send her to get his revenge?  In the (theoretical) original story, was he less than the seemingly caring father he seemed?  Likewise, is Hanna herself in that possible original story perhaps more of a Frankenstein monster, whose outward emotions are about to be exposed as a sham?  She is, after all, designed to be a soldier.  She is, in the words of one of the characters, less emotional, more calculating.  Deadly.  And what of CIA agent Marissa (Cate Blanchett)? Could it turn out, in the end, that despite her seeming evil in the movie’s early going, she in actuality is trying to do good and stop a potential monster from being unleashed onto an unknowing public?

Perhaps I’m over thinking things and all these story ideas that did not materialize within the movie were never a part of what Hanna was about. Regardless, this is a film that despite much good, is ultimately too slow, too frustrating, and too pointless to recommend.

Pass.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) a (right on time!) review

I’m re-posting this review here (it was in my original, now defunct blog that used to be in this place).  I’ve revised it a bit for clarity, but it is essentially all here:

Short review: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a fun, exciting action film with some truly great action sequences that will have viewers -especially those who went to see the film in IMAX- on the edge of their seat.  Only real minus: the villain, Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), isn’t terribly well developed.  He’s just “there”, a deadly threat who is being chased throughout the film but, in the end, a character who isn’t defined much beyond being a bad guy who wants to start a nuclear war between the Soviets and the USA.   I would even recommend the movie to those who may have had their fill of Tom Cruise.  Set those feelings aside.  He’s awfully good in this movie, as is the “team” around him.

SPOILER-filled review follows!

Have you ever seen a film that, upon exiting the theaters, you could tell it underwent some major revisions in the story it was trying to tell?

Note, for example, how the original Lethal Weapon began:  The movie starts with a pretty young (and topless!) woman very graphically falling to her death from a ten story building.  We then switch over to a mentally damaged Vietnam vet (Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs) who is doubly traumatized by the war and the recent death of the love of his life.   He’s a man who wanders naked in his trailer home, drinking heavily while building up the courage to -quite literally- blow his brains out.  After this very heavy and melodramatic start, what should happen?   The film makes a very sudden shift in tone and becomes a slapstick action/comedy, with Riggs acting more and more like a missing member of the three stooges!  The most incredible thing?  Despite that R-rated “grindhouse”-type start, the shift worked!   To this day, I suspect the original script of the film was more in line with those first ten or so minutes of the movie, but the director and actors decided to move into other territory, eschewing the script in the process.

But changing a film on the fly doesn’t always work quite as well.  I was so excited when the original Tim Burton-directed Batman was about to be released that I purchased and read the film’s novelization before the movie’s release.  Upon seeing the film, I was surprised to find the second half of the novel and the second half of the movie were completely different.  The differences between the novel and what appeared on the screen, I could only guess, were the result of the novel’s author going by the film’s screenplay while Mr. Burton and company deciding while filming to eschew the screenplay and go their own way.  This, in turn, explains why the second half of the movie was so…out there.  Note, however, that what was in the novel was not all that much better.  The original Batman film was cursed with a great opening but a weak conclusion.

In a very roundabout way, this leads us back to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.  Upon seeing the film, I was satisfied with the experience, as mentioned above, but I immediately suspected there were some big changes made to the movie’s script, changes that made a darker, more labyrinthine story far more simple.  For if there is one thing anyone who sees the movie should realize is that the film presents numerous very, very strong hints that someone within the Impossible Missions group (IMF for short) is a traitor.  And yet, despite all those very clear indications early on, by the time the film ends, that element is completely discarded and ignored!

Allow me to present my case.

In the film, we begin with a botched mission involving Josh Hollaway’s Hanaway, Paula Patton’s Jane, and Simon Pegg’s Benji.  In a train station Hanaway pilfers a file and is immediately (indeed, almost too quickly) identified by the bad guys and is given chase.  Hanaway eludes the bad guys, but just when he thinks he’s gotten away, he is confronted by Sabine Moreau (Lea Seydoux) a beautiful female blond assassin who shoots him and steals the prized file.

Jane, Hanaway’s teammate and (we find) girlfriend, arrives just as he draws his last breaths.  Tears are shed for the lost teammate/boyfriend and the story proper then begins.  Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) joins the remains of that original team and continues their mission.

They’re off, with only four or so hours to spare, to infiltrate the Kremlin and steal some nuclear missile codes that, in conjunction with the now lost file Hanaway had, will allow the big bad guy the ability to launch a nuclear weapon.  As it turns out, the big bad guy, Hendricks, is already in the Kremlin, stealing the files right under the nose of Ethan Hunt and his group (or is he?  More on that in a second).  Not only that, Hendricks knows the IMF is there, and makes a fake radio message on their radio frequency (which the Russians hear) implicating them for what follows: a massive bomb that takes out a section of the Kremlin.

Thus, in very short order our bad guy has had the jump on the IMF team not once, but twice.  But how would he know what they’re doing in such a short period of time?  There is only one possibility, of course:  Someone in that group is a mole and tipped him off.

Later in the film, the team is in Dubai.  The female blonde assassin, Sabine, is selling the file she took from Hanaway to Hendricks.  The IMF team is forced to separate the buyer from the seller because a key piece of their tech malfunctioned (as presented in the final cut of the film, this is just an innocent thing.  But if we are to assume one of the IMF members is a mole…).  Because of the malfunction in the equipment, the big bad, or rather his henchman, has to be given the actual nuclear codes because he brought along someone who can verify them.

The teams separate, in a clever set piece where buyers and sellers and their files/pay is swapped.   The upside to all this is that Ethan is forced to chase after Hendricks’ henchman while Jane, still nursing extreme hatred toward Sabine for what she did to her boyfriend, has to guard the blonde assassin.   Before this, Ethan Hunt had drilled into the team the need to keep Sabine alive.   She is an “asset”, he says, and Jane can get her revenge on Sabine AFTER they have gotten intel from her.

But what does Jane do with Sabine?

She has Benji guard her while she blows off steam in the bathroom.  She leaves a deadly killer who -incredibly!- hasn’t been subdued or handcuffed, to be guarded by the team member who is least qualified to take care of her!  Of course, Sabine busts loose.  Belatedly Jane jumps into action, fighting Sabine and eventually kicking her out of the building and to her death.  Dead men/women, as they say, tell no tales.

Meanwhile, Ethan Hunt chases Hendricks’ henchman through Dubai.  In the course of the chase, Ethan grabs at the henchman’s face, ripping off a piece of it.  Ethan is shocked to realize the henchman is wearing an IMF face mask disguise!

It was precisely at that point in the film that (I thought!) the movie’s plot became crystal clear.   The “henchman,” I was certain, was in actuality Josh Holloway’s Hanaway.  He wasn’t really killed by Sabine after all.  And because it was his girlfriend, Jane, at his side when he supposedly “died”, that meant she too knew he was still alive.

Things fell into place.

Which of the IMF people was outside the Kremlin when the explosion went off?  Jane.  Of the three members of the IMF, she was in the safest place when the explosion occurred -on purpose!- and she was the one that made sure the IMF people were right where they needed to be.  She set the trap.

Backing up a little, it was now clear Hanaway and Jane had also subcontracted Sabine to get the file and fake Hanaway’s death.  That in turn explained why the IMF equipment malfunctioned (Jane sabotaged it) and also explained why Jane mysteriously left Sabine alone with the inexperienced Benji.  Sabine likely thought Jane was giving her an opportunity to escape while in reality Jane was setting up another double cross to plausibly be “forced” to kill the blonde assassin despite Ethan Hunt’s repeated instructions she be kept alive.  Returning to Hendricks’ appearance within the Kremlin:  Clearly it was Hanaway disguised as Hendricks who was actually there.  After all, wasn’t it odd how he almost made himself be seen by Ethan Hunt?

Now, I was certain, as Ethan Hunt grasped the piece of facial disguise, he was aware of this subterfuge.   He knew Hanaway was alive.  After all, who but an IMF agent would use such a disguise?  For all we knew, the supposed big bad guy, Michael Nyqvist’s Hendricks, may not have even been alive anymore.  The bad guys, all along, were Hanaway and Jane.  It all made so much sense.

And then the movie proceeded.

Ethan Hunt looks up at the henchman, whom he had just ripped part of his disguise off of.  The bad guy is in the back of a truck, quickly moving away from Ethan Hunt’s reach.   The bad guy rips the rest of the mask off, revealing he’s… Hendricks.

HUH!?!

As the movie continued to its end, this little reveal made increasingly less sense.   First off, why would Hendricks go to Dubai disguised as his own henchman?   Later in the film, when the actual henchman appears at his side, we find the man is in complete lock step with his boss…to the point where he’s very willing to die for their shared beliefs.  Again, why would Hendricks show up personally in Dubai, dressed as his own henchman when the guy is so clearly loyal to him?   It made no sense.  When the film was over, I was more convinced than ever that the original story had Josh Holloway’s Hanaway and Paula Patton’s Jane as the “big bads”.   But maybe during production of the film all those double crosses were considered a little too much and the decision was made to streamline the story.

Thus, Hanaway dies at the start of the film, period.  Jane is one of the good guys, period.   Hendricks is the bad guy, period.  Despite mountains of evidence, there is no mole.  Hendricks has the jump on the IMF force several times because…well…because he’s a very smart bad guy.  No more explanation offered or needed.

Much simpler.  Yet not nearly as satisfying.  Still, it didn’t destroy the film and I continue to recommend it.  However, I do think the film could/should have been even better, if indeed it originally had these concepts.

The Blog of E. R. Torre